E-Book Overview
Helen Waddell's collection of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, first published in 1929, appeared in the wake of her book The Wandering Scholars (1926), and was complementary to the latter, in that it contained the source material on which that literary history had been based. In order to undertake that overview, Waddell had prepared her own translations.
The poems are printed in Latin with facing English translations; they are accompanied by 38 pages of biographical notes, in which Waddell provides brief summaries and bibliographical information on her chosen authors/poems. The book is rounded off by three indexes: of authors and manuscripts, to first lines (English), and to first lines (Latin).
The poems are arranged in chronological order, starting with the Copa and ending with a poem from the Arundel Lyrics, thus spanning a period of about 1100 years. The geographical span reaches from Italy, via Spain, Gaul, Francia, the Low Countries, Germany, and England to Scotland. Thematically, the poems are mostly concerned with nature, love, and friendship. About one third of the collection is made up of poems from the Carmina Burana. The rest includes authors such as Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola, Boethius, Venantius Fortunatus, Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, Walahfrid Strabo, Sedulius Scottus, Sigebert of Gembloux, and Peter Abelard. There are also four pieces from the Cambridge Songs, as well as a number of anonymous poems.
E-Book Content
MEDIJEVAL LATIN LYRICS
By the same Author THE WANDERING SCHOLARS THE DESERT FATHERS BEASTS AND SAINTS LYRICS FROM THE CHINESE THE ABBE PREVOST A BOOK OF MEDiiEVAL LATIN FOR SCHOOLS PETER ABELARD
MEDIJEVAL LATIN LYRICS by
HELEN WADDELL
CONSTABLE · LONDON
LONDON PUBLISHED BY
Constable and Company Ltd. 10-12
ORANGE STREET, w.c.2
INDIA
Orient Longmans Ltd. BOMBAY
CALCUTTA
MADRAS
CANADA
Longmans, Green and Company TORONTO
First published Second Edition Third Edition Fourth Edition (revised) Reprinted Repri1>ted Reprinted Reprinted Reprinted Reprinted Reprinted Fifth Edition
1929 1930 1930 1933 1935 1938 194• 1943
Printed in Great Britain by RICHARD CLAY AND COMPANY, LTD.
BUNGAY
Suffolk
PREFACE THE introduction to this collection of medireval Latin verse was written some years ago in The Wandering Scholars, which proved in the end to be not so much a study of the Vagantes as a long digression, a kind of imperfect history of medireval lyric. The excuse for that long digression is in the half-articulate melody of the fragments of earlier verse that follow, as timid in comparison with the ease of twelfth and thirteenth century lyric as Sir Thomas Wyatt's uncertain plucking at the strings with the flawless resonance of Campion. Yet the one is the begetter of the other. The lyric of the great age, 1150 to 1250, has secret springs, and scholars have made a good, if non-proven, case for Celtic and Arabic ; but the deepest source is in the pagan learning that flows like a sunk river through the medireval centuries, the " ancient fields " whither Alcuin rose from his bed to go morning after morning, thumbing the sleep from his eyes (discutit ex oculis nocturnos pollice somnos), with the dawnlight fresh on the sea-
Splendida dum rutilat roseis Aurora quadrigis Perfundens pelagus nova luce liquidum. It is for the sake of the unbroken tradition that the Virgilian Copa and a handful of lyrics of the Silver Age have been included, verse that by no straining of chronology could be called medireval. They are here because by means of them the line of descent can be more clearly traced ; they were the wayfaring-tree, the lenta viburna that could bear transplanting, where the cypress of the greater Roman verse must stand solitary. Petronius is clos